The Effect of Oral Feedback on Writing Ability

Different studies have had conflicting results during the last three decades regarding corrective feedback. Some are for corrective feedback and some others are against it. The present study, like all other studies carried out in this field, sought to find some evidence on the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of providing students with corrective feedback. However, what makes this study stand out is the use of oral feedback as a form of feedback and exploring the effect of such an apparatus in teaching writing to the students of English as a foreign language. Two groups of participants were tested for their proficiency level. When found homogenous, they were pretested for their writing ability. A ten session instruction was given to both groups but with the treatment group receiving the oral feedback and critical thinking skills. In the last session, the two groups were post tested. The pre and posttest writing samples were given to 2 raters to be scored. They were supposed to give 3 scores to each sample; one as an overall score, and two for essay components identified by IELTS task 2 writing band descriptor including ‘lexical resource’ and ‘grammatical range and accuracy’. The gain scores of the two groups were compared using multiple independent t-tests for the three scores. The treatment group was found significantly different and better.